Survey
description
Marriage data include all marriages occurring in States that meet reporting criteria for
inclusion in the marriage-registration area, except for California unlicensed marriages.
Marriages occurring outside the marriage-registration area are not included.
Data file
description
Data are obtained from certificates of marriages occurring in each registration State.
Records of each State in the marriage-registration area were sampled at one of five
sampling rates used in processing 1968-95 data. Data are weighted, based on the sampling
fraction of the reporting State.
The files include one
record for each marriage in the sample. Marriage certificate numbers are not
recorded.
NCHS does not distribute certificates, files, or indexes with identifying information for
marriages. Please refer to the section of the home page on "How to obtain birth, death, marriage, and
divorce certificates."
List of data file
variables at a glance Data year
Age of:
Bride
Groom
Date of birth (month/year):
Bride
Groom
Date of marriage (month/day)
Date last marriage ended1 (month/year)
(1970-88):
Bride
Groom
Education:1(1970-88):
Bride
Groom
Interval from last marriage to present marriage1
(1970-88):
Bride
Groom
Number of this marriage:1
Bride
Groom
Previous marital status:1
Bride
Groom
Race:1
Bride (three categories)
Groom (three categories)
State of birth1 (1969-88):
Bride
Groom
State of residence:2
Bride
Groom
Type of ceremony1 (1972-88)
Record weight
_______________________________________________________ 1Applicable
only for those States having information on the certificate. 2Beginning in 1970, the place of residence for brides or grooms who were nonresidents of
the United States has been coded to the country of residence (eight categories). Formerly
these persons were considered resident brides or grooms of the place of occurrence.
Note: Many of these items
are not available beyond 1988.
Geographic
coverage
Marriage data are classified by State of occurrence. From 1968 through 1970, the
marriage-registration area included 39 States and the District of Columbia; two additional
States were included in 1971; one additional State was included in 1979 and there was no
further change until 1995 when one State dropped out of the registration area. Data are
not classified for counties or cities.
Data availability Marriage data are
collected annually. Data are available for individual years from 1968-90.
Data for 1991-95 are available on a single CD-ROM. Please refer to the notice
"Change in the Reporting of
Marriage and Divorce Statistics" for information about data after 1990.
Ordering
information
Marriage data for
individual years. 1968-1990, are only available in ASCII format and can be purchased
on CD-ROM through the National Technical Information Service (NTIS).
A single CD-ROM containing data from 1989-1995 in the SETS format is available from
either NTIS or the Government Printing Office (GPO). As
prices vary, please contact NTIS or GPO for current pricing.
Documentation contents
The necessary documentation, including content, technical information, a discussion of the sample design,
sampling and estimating procedures, sampling errors, and control total tables
, is included with each CD-ROM.
Contact
Reproductive Statistics Branch
Division of Vital Statistics
National Center for Health Statistics
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
3311 Toledo Road, Room 7318
Hyattsville, Maryland 20782-2003
(301) 458-4111